Posts Tagged: Non-Apis bees

Spring in Northern California has been good for collecting different native bee species along with other flower visiting insects. With summer approaching fast, native bees are thriving on yellow flowering plants such as Yellow Star Thistle (Centaurea solstitialis) and Great Valley Gumplant (Grindelia camporum). On these two species of flowers I collected 6 genera including…

In my last blog I explained how to pin and label bees. In this blog I am going to talk about another way to store and preserve soft bodied insects or larvae. This is particularly useful when you want to store the larvae or pupae of bees. There is an image above of different bee…

In prior blogs, I talked about methods of collecting bees from nets to bowl traps. I am now going to talk about the process of pinning the insects that have been collected. If the collected bees are frozen, put them on a paper towel or tissue to dry for 10 minutes or so. I will…

Before going out to collect bees there are a few things that you will need. Some of items are essential for collecting faster flying specimens. You should have small lidded containers to place the bees in. If you put small pieces of tissue in the container, those pieces give the bees something to hold on…

The word ocelli is derived from the Latin word ocellus and means little eye. The ocelli are simple eyes that bees use to orientate themselves towards the sun. Located in a triangular shape are two dorsal ocelli and one central ocelli. They are located dorsally on the bees head (see images above for location). The…

A few days ago I was sitting out on my back porch and something rather large caught my eye. I heard it before I saw it, the incriminating buzz that was slightly different than that of a honey bee and came dangerously close to my face, making me duck my head in reaction. What…

Ever wonder how bees can hold on so well? For starters, honey bees are insects that have 3 pairs of segmented legs. The legs can do more than just hold on, the tibia of the hind legs have adapted hair to hold pollen. When the hairs are filled with pollen,it is termed “pollen basket “or…

In the previous two blogs, I have talked about the invasive plant “Spotted Knapweed.” Centaurea stoebe is native to Europe and was introduced into the United States in the late 1800s through contaminated seed. Spotted knapweed is considered by some a nuisance because it displaces native plants and forage for livestock. The plant releases toxins…

In the last blog, I talked about the invasive plant “Spotted Knapweed.” This plant is unique because it supports several oligolectic bee species, which means that the bees visit (for pollen and nectar) very specific host plant species. Lithurgus chrysurus, or the Mediterranean wood boring bee, is one of them (see previous blog). Another bee…

I have been collecting insects since 2005 and I collected almost anything unique to the eye. A majority of my collection was Coleoptera and Hymenoptera. In 2008, I started collecting native bees when I was using bowl traps for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. My collecting was concentrated in Montgomery, Chester and Lehigh County….